Most tech-savvy local-business owners have a decent idea of how to do local SEO, but diving to a deeper level can get confusing.

For example, most people think that in order to have successful local SEO, you must have directory listings. This is true — to a point. First, though, you have to make sure that several other things are in order. (Directory listings don’t come first in local SEO.)

Measurable results: follow-up visibility reports show how your online presence has grown with your listings and rate the relative SEO value of each profile so you know where to focus your marketing efforts

Gain the favor of search engines: be rewarded with a top position in search engine results with consistent directory profiles and up-to-date contact information

Why are citations such an important ranking factor?

In lieu of having to manually review business information for millions of companies, Google uses data points it can process programmatically to determine your rankings.

When determining how you rank in local results, Google scans the web for mentions of your business name, address, phone number, website URL, and several other data points.

It then compares that information to other data sources, including the major data providers and possibly even post office records, state business filings, and telephone records.

Both sites are about things to do within Columbus, where the cafe is found. You need to get these hyper-centric citations.

First of all, you’ll want to make sure that Google can “read” your N.A.P. information (a.k.a. it’s crawlable).

This means you’ll want to make sure that this information is actual text, not an image with text on it because Google cannot “read” or see images like we do as users.

On this citation, the phone number is listed and the address matches – everything is accurate now, but not completely consistent. This citation is using dashes instead of dots for the phone number.

One thing that is absolutely wonderful about both of these examples is that they are both from highly local resources.

How business data is distributed

There are data companies that collect, verify, and distribute business data for companies all around the world. When a business is started, its information eventually finds its way into this business data ecosystem.